Action Types is a fantastic student project. Marcus Schaefer was trying to create a typographic toy to show children different types of fonts. The 3 dimensional letters consist of three very different fonts – Actiontype Bold, Actiontype Light and Actiontype Serif (slab serif). Action Types do not only provide these 3 fonts. Using them as base models, several random fonts can be constructed by interpolation. This is radical!

Joanna left two disposable cameras on park benches–one in Manhattan and one in Brooklyn. She was curious to see what would happen! Would they be stolen? Would people take rude photos? Her intern Matt left a note saying: “Good afternoon! I attached this camera to the bench so you could take pictures. Seriously. So have fun. I’ll be back later this evening to pick it up.”

That night, when he returned to the scene, both cameras were there, and the rolls of film had been shot. Below are two of them. See all of them here. Love!

Adobe Font Development Kit for OpenType package let’s you share the tools used by Adobe font developers for wrapping up PostScript fonts as OpenType/CFF font files, and adding OpenType layout features. These tools are used for in-house development of new Adobe OpenType fonts. Use them at your own risk, and with no guarantee of support!

YES! Gmail has added additional functionality making it easy for you to attach multiple attachments to an email. Google tend to stay away from most things flash unless absolutely necessary but in this case they’ve made an exception! Finally!

OCR Terminal is an free online Optical Character Recognition service that allows you to convert scanned images and pdf’s into editable and text searchable documents. It accurately preserves formatting and layout of documents. Awesome!

Do you have untitled songs in your iTunes Library and you don’t know who the artist is? Musicbrainz can automatically identify and label your music files — all you have to do is download and run a MusicBrainz enabled tagger. So, it’s Shazam for your computer?! Whee!

Check out this somewhat analaog weather forecast system. Pick your city and see an image depicting your current weather. My favorite picture is ‘snow‘. Windy is pretty funny as well! A project by Kurt Riedi and Steffi Gloor.

Cufón aims to become a worthy alternative to sIFR, which despite its merits still remains painfully tricky to set up and use. To achieve this ambitious goal the following requirements were set:

1. No plug-ins required – it can only use features natively supported by the client
2. Compatibility – it has to work on every major browser on the market
3. Ease of use – no or near-zero configuration needed for standard use cases
4. Speed – it has to be fast, even for sufficiently large amounts of text

I am loving some of the new features in New Safari 4 Browser (Beta). My favorite is the Top Sites Feature: Safari automatically identifies your favorite sites and displays them as a wall of stunning graphical previews. To visit one of your top sites, just click any of the previews. As you browse, Safari identifies the websites you’re most interested in based on how often and how recently you visit a site. So as you explore the web and discover new websites, your top sites will change to match your evolving tastes.

Kapitza’s Geometric book comes with a CD containing 100 pattern fonts – the most extensive pattern font collection available from any foundry. It also includes a helpful font index and easy to follow tutorials. Love!

So in one sense, mastering grids is a very low-level, roll-up-your-sleeves kind of thing. But I think in a larger sense, it’s an important part in every designer’s growth because it trains you to see and think about context, how smaller parts fit into a larger whole. Once you begin ordering elements with a grid, then you inevitably apply similar logic to the entirety of a document or site or what have you, and then to the process and workflow that drive your design brief, and then perhaps to the organization as a whole. Rigorous thinking about small details can effect meaningful changes in the big picture.

Our little Ella is going through a complete Slinky Obsession which has turned G into a pro in detangling ‘slinkies in need’. Sometimes simple toys still have the highest entertainment value. What ‘old school’ toys are your kids into?